‘These were the castoffs’

Entering their inaugural season, the Golden Knights weren’t just underdogs, they were cobbled together out of other teams’ spare parts.

Screenwriter turned UNLV film professor Sean Clark says if he were writing the movie adaptation, “I’d probably make more of the fact that these weren’t rising stars, that these were castoffs.”

“One of the oldest, richest stories we have in dramatic literature is the revenge story,” says Clark, who doubles as the associate dean of the College of Fine Arts. “So usually it’s not just that they’re underdogs, it’s that they’ve been cast aside. That ‘you can’t make it,’ it’s been pushed in their face. We love a revenge story. … The great thing about sports is, it puts it into context. It takes the lethality out of it. And it’s something we can really get behind. ‘I’ve been there! I know exactly that feeling!’ ”

The hot start by Las Vegas’ first major league sports franchise gave the city something to rally around in the days following the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. It’s a story like no other.

Clark picked up his son at T-Mobile Arena following the team’s final preseason game on Oct. 1. They drove past the Route 91 Harvest festival about 40 minutes before the shooting began.

“I’m ferociously proud of our city, and I think it can’t just be another sports movie,” he says of any potential film based on the Golden Knights’ run. “It’s gotta be the story of us, and the story of that shooting that just makes me angry to talk about, and how far down you can go.”